Back then, in the time of guerrilleros and civil war, of scampering barefoot and washing clothes by the river, she couldn't have told you what Houston was.

Back then, in her child's mind, it was just another name for the United States. A dot on a map. A portal to a different world, 1,200 miles away from her village of El Zamoran in El Salvador.

A place that had taken her mother and would, someday, take her.

Back then, in the days of Frida Villalobos' girlhood, Houston was just a dream. War and hardship and hunger were her reality.

Her mother had left El Salvador when Villalobos was 2, leaving the toddler in the care of her grandmother. A violent conflict between the military-led government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front rebels raged. Food was scarce. Fear was rampant.

Villalobos remembers that time in flashes of sights and sounds and smells.

There are good memories: the aroma of tortillas cooking on outdoor stoves. Snuggling next to her grandmother at night. The camaraderie of posadas and good food at Christmastime.

But there are also bad ones: hiding under beds, her face pressed against a dirt floor, wild geese crowding in next to her. Children holding machine guns as big as their small bodies. Female fighters with red scarves covering their faces.

The groans of people injured by gunfire. The bullet holes and shattered pictures left by rebels who rampaged through her grandmother's home. Bodies, covered in white linen, scattered in the streets.

Finally, the mother she barely remembered secured the paperwork and sent for her daughter. Frida arrived in Houston in December 1994, a month before her 13th birthday.

Suddenly, that dot on a map became a place of buildings climbing into the sky, freeways plaited like Belgian lace and marvels like running water and color TVs.

For a long time, it also became a place of tears.

She felt disconnected from her mother, who had started a new family in the U.S.; alienated from the "regular" kids at school who spoke English and didn't wear secondhand clothes; and homesick for her grandmother and the warmth of Salvadoran culture.

"I didn't want to come but knew I had to come. My logic said it was the right thing to do, that there was a better life here," says Villalobos, now 33. "But my heart said something else."

Eventually, she stopped crying. She learned English, dug into schoolwork, made friends and went off to college: Texas State in San Marcos. The sojourn gave her a taste of independence and freedom. It whetted her appetite for travel and to carve out a niche of her own.

Still, that dot on the map, that place of tall buildings and knotted highways, seemed to call her back, just as it had beckoned her mother so many years before.

After a stint at a TV station in Waco, Villalobos returned to Houston, working as an assistant producer at KHOU-TV, then as communications coordinator with the Houston Area Women's Center.

Today, she is the communications manager for Neighborhood Centers, lives in the same Northside neighborhood where she arrived as a newcomer and is raising a soon-to-be-2-year-old son, Gael.

Gael's birth has transformed Houston yet again.

Now, the place that once seemed so foreign has become the city where her son was born. It's where he totters in his favorite pair of shoes, where warm breezes whisper through the trees in the Heights and along Memorial Drive, where the earthy smell of rain reminds Villalobos of El Salvador.

Monica Rhor is a narrative writer covering gender, sexuality, spirituality and race issues for the Houston Chronicle. She also has been a staff writer for the Associated Press, Boston Globe, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer and Orange County Register. She's written about riots in Miami and hurricanes in Houston, uncovered serious flaws in California’s restraining order system and documented stalled investigations of serial killings in South Florida. Monica, who was born in Ecuador and raised in New Jersey, also has taught high school journalism and English.